Posted on 02/12/2002 12:24:57 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Since 1920 creationists have been successful in persuading legislatures in five Southern states to pass laws favorable to their views, but the courts consistently struck them down, saying that they violated the establishment clause of the Constitution. In the 1990s creationists began focusing instead on changing state educational standards. The most famous attempt to do so in recent years--the decision of the Kansas Board of Education to eliminate evolution from the state's science standards--was not a success: the decision was reversed in 2001 when antievolution board members were defeated for reelection.
Still, creationists have been victorious in many other states, a trend catalogued by Lawrence S. Lerner of California State University at Long Beach. His evaluation, summarized and updated in the map below, is valuable in part because it points up the widespread sway of creationists in Northern states, such as Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin, that have a liberal or moderate tradition. Furthermore, it highlights the fact that certain Southern states--North and South Carolina--have more rigorous educational standards than some Northern states, such as New York and Massachusetts.
There is little information on what is actually taught in individual classrooms and school districts, so it is not clear what effect state standards have on the quality of evolution teaching. The influence of the standards is, however, potentially great because they are likely to affect the content of textbooks and lesson plans. Standards set the tone under which teachers and administrators work and, if written well, make it easier for science-oriented educators to insist that all teachers, including the one third who advocate equal time for creationism, observe proper guidelines.
Creationists have been able to alter state education standards despite being a fairly small minority. According to a 1999 poll by the People for the American Way Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based organization opposed to the teaching of creationism in science classes, only 16 percent of Americans support the teaching of creationism to the exclusion of evolution. A huge majority--83 percent--favor teaching evolution, but most of them maintain that creationism should be discussed in science classes with evolution. Only 37 percent expressed strong support for evolution--that is, teaching it to the exclusion of all religious doctrine in science classes.
In the absence of a majority favoring strict standards for evolution teaching, it is easy to see why creationists have been able to make headway even outside the circle of evangelical Christianity. In 1996 Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the Catholic Church's commitment to evolution, first stated in 1950, saying that his inspiration for doing so came from the Bible. Despite this, 40 percent of American Catholics in a 2001 Gallup poll said they believed that God created human life in the past 10,000 years. Indeed, fully 45 percent of all Americans subscribe to this creationist view. Many who are indifferent to conservative theology give creationism some support, perhaps because, as mathematician Norman Levitt of Rutgers University suggests, the subject of evolution provokes anxiety about the nature of human existence, an anxiety that antievolutionists use to promote creationist ideas.
Right, I was thinking only of the federal constitution. Each state must paddle its own canoe. (I think I know where Kansas will come down on this, and that's up to them.)
Translation:
"I am unable to understand the processes by which DNA evolved naturally; and if I can't understand it then no one else can understand it, now or in the future, thus the natural evolution of DNA is impossible; and therefore I declare that a Great Designer did it."
Damnation! monophonic, decent crotchet client. Shrewdest preparation alienates roguishly. Nonsense!!
Who told you about this?
So you are proposing that there are no "objective" criteria we can apply to determine whether or not the Taj Mahal was designed. Those SETI guys must be urinating up a rope.
Yeah, kinda like my house.
Obviously, the result of the Not So Intelligent Designer.
There is so much wrong with this that it would take hours of lecturing to point out everything. That is time I will not devote to you. But by way of summary:
1. Evolution is no more a religion than physics or chemistry.
2. Teaching science alongside mythology and mysticism, as if they were epistemologically equal, is so intellectually flawed that if you can't see it, you're just not qualified for the debate
3. No science can be "proven empirically," whatever you think that means. But they can be demonstrated to be consistent with the data. Creationism is consistent only with scripture, which is very nice, but which is useless in a scientific context.
4. Students are not qualified to make such decisions. That's why they're in school.
One endures frustration if one waits for intellectual consistency from them.
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